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2 ideas
| 22647 | A complete system is just a classification of the whole world's ingredients [James] |
| Full Idea: A completed theoretic philosophy can never be anything more than a completed classification of the world's ingredients. | |
| From: William James (The Sentiment of Rationality [1882], p.23) | |
| A reaction: I assume this is not just the physical ingredients, but must also include our conceptual scheme - but then we must first decide which is the best conceptual scheme to classify, and that's where the real action is. [He scorns such classifation later]. |
| 13876 | The syntactic category is primary, and the ontological category is derivative [Frege, by Wright,C] |
| Full Idea: For Frege it is the syntactic category which is primary, the ontological one derivative. | |
| From: report of Gottlob Frege (Grundlagen der Arithmetik (Foundations) [1884]) by Crispin Wright - Frege's Concept of Numbers as Objects 1.iii | |
| A reaction: I take the recent revival of metaphysics to be a rebellion against precisely this thought. Ontology disappeared for a hundred years into a hopeless miasma of linguistic complexity. Language is cludge, but the world isn't. |